Buoyancy Essay

The boat, despite many bugs that needed to be worked out, preformed to the team’s expectations and in the result preformed well. There are many aspects to how the boat performed as well as it did and why some of the problems that were encountered were present. These aspects include the physics concepts of buoyancy and efficiency; the design choice to have the propeller bellow water and a narrower, longer body; and testing and debugging the vessel to work optimally. The vessel operated well due to the physics concepts of buoyancy and efficiency. Buoyancy works because the boat is less dense than the water causing the water to push it up causing it to float; the less density of the boat the nearer to the surface the vessel floats. The boat …show more content…
The vessels design was chosen by consensus of the whole team. It was agreed upon that the vessel would have a more streamlined design and an underwater propeller. The underwater propeller was decided on after the discovery that the majority of the vessels with the best time had underwater propellers. It was also determined that the density of the water would help stabilize and propel the boat faster with less work from the motor. Observing the efficiency of the boat this may not be an incorrect assumption. Another design choice of this vessel was its streamlined design with a more rounded body with long and narrow skis. This choice was made because the narrow skis would keep the boat stable while still keeping the resistance to a minimum. The body and skis were constructed of foam and popsicle sticks to keep the body as lightweight as possible while still being fairly stable and …show more content…
This was perhaps the longest and most time consuming stage of the development of the vessel. The first stage of testing was seeing what features of the boat to add, remove, or modify. The first feature of the boat that was tested was the rudders; the vessel was tested with either the left, right, both sides, or no rudders at all. After a test for each variable it was concluded that the rudders did not stabilize the boat and instead just slowed it down, so they were removed. Next the team tested the position of the battery to test if it would affect the trajectory of the vessel; several tests showed that the position of the battery was perhaps one of the most vital design choices. It was discovered that placing the battery on the left ski counterbalanced the boat and caused it to follow a much straighter trajectory reducing the time by almost a second. The last feature of the boat that was tested was the angle and depth of the propeller. The first test was with the propeller at about -45 degrees and more deeply submerged in the water. This proved effective but not as effective as the next test. The next test was the propeller at -30 degrees at about mid level in the water; this decreased the time drastically.The last test was done out of simple curiosity about how the boat would perform if the propeller was above the water at a zero degree angle. The boat performed as expected in